Interviews November 5, 2014

When I recently tried to describe Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation to one of my closest friends, I told her it was the kind of book that should be boring but isn’t. What I meant is that it’s about parenting and adultery and a marriage between sensible-enough middle-class Americans, and that plot-wise nothing shocking or even particularly weird happens, but that reading it kept me up into the night, and at six in the morning, closing its covers, I felt invigorated instead of sleep-deprived. Faced with the task of explaining the book, though—of trying to describe the short